by Alan
M. Dershowitz
September
12, 2014
Hamas
quickly produces photographs of dead babies to be shown around the world, while
at the same time preventing the media from showing its rocket launchers in
densely populated areas.
Unless
Hamas's "dead baby strategy" is denounced and stopped -- by the
international community, the media, the academy and all good people -- it will
be coming soon "to a theater near you".
If
Hamas's dead baby strategy works, why not repeat it every few years? And why
shouldn't other terrorist groups, like ISIS and Boko Haram, adapt this strategy
to their nefarious goals as Hezbollah has already done?
On June
13, 2014, the commander of the Gaza Division of the Israel Defense Forces took
me into a Hamas tunnel that had recently been discovered by a Bedouin tracker
who serves in the IDF. The tunnel was a concrete bunker that extended several
miles from its entrance in the Gaza Strip to its exit near an Israeli kibbutz
kindergarten.
The
tunnel had one purpose: to allow Hamas death squads to kill and kidnap
Israelis.
The commander told me that Israeli intelligence had identified more
than two dozen additional tunnel entrances in the Gaza Strip. They had been
identified by the large amounts of earth being removed to dig them. Although
Israeli intelligence knew where these entrances were, they could not order an
attack from the air, because they were built into civilian structures such as
mosques, schools, hospitals, and private homes. Nor could Israel identify their
underground routes from Gaza into Israel, or their intended exit points in
Israel. Israeli scientists and military experts had spent millions of dollars
in an effort to develop technologies that could find the underground routes and
intended exits for tunnels that were as deep as a hundred feet beneath the
earth, but they had not succeeded in finding a complete solution to this
problem. The planned exits from these tunnels in Israel were also a Hamas
secret, hidden deep in the ground and incapable of being discovered by Israel
until the Hamas fighters emerged. At that point it would be too late to prevent
the death squads from doing their damage.
I was
taken into the tunnel and saw the technological innovations: tracks on which
small trains could transport kidnapped Israelis back to Gaza; telephone and
electrical lines; crevices beneath schools and other civilian targets that
could hold explosives; and smaller offshoot tunnels leading from the main tube
to numerous exit points from which fighters could simultaneously emerge from
different places.
My goal
is to show that Israel's military actions in defense of its citizens have been
just, and that they have been conducted in a just manner. They are no less just
than the military actions being conducted by the United States and its allies
against ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other terrorist groups. And they have been carried
out at least as justly, with a lower percentage of civilian-to-combatant
casualties.
Yet
Israel has been unjustly condemned from too many corners, thus encouraging
Hamas to continue its despicable and unlawful dead baby strategy. For the sake
of justice and peace, the world must stop applying a double standard to the
nation-state of the Jewish people.
[1]
Different acronyms have been used to refer to the Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria, or ISIS, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL] and
simply the Islamic State [IS].
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